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Needed: an alternative US vision

The Democrats can play the faith game their way, says Simon Schama

When I was at school in the 1950s I remember a history teacher saying: “Well, lads, one thing we can be sure about in the next half of the 20th century is that nationalism and organised religion are definitely on their way out.”

So much for predictions about history. It’s taken us for ever — or at least until this American election — to catch up with the fact that tribal, nationalist sentiment is alive and well in the modern world.

The assumption that we, the worldly elite, have made is that modernity and the cyber age must necessarily evaporate the fantasies of faith. But just the opposite has happened. The web, it turns out, is not about knowledge or science, it’s about opinion and belief.

It’s an ideal medium, not to test or interrogate noisy propositions, but just to broadcast them. What so many people who are horrified by the Bush